Feature: Cells and the city

20 December 2011

Artist and PhD researcher Daksha Patel has used Wellcome Images to create a series of maps of Manchester, linking environmental data to the inside of the human body.

"Our bodies are permeable: the city enters our bodies through our skin, our lungs and our ears. I wanted to question this idea of fixed borders, of enclosing spaces - which is central to map making - by merging the boundaries of the body and the city," says Daksha Patel, an artist and PhD researcher at Northumbria University.

Her works for the ‘Diffusion’ project look at the ways in which people construct cities and are in turn affected by the cities they inhabit.

Commissioned to produce a new series of drawings for the lightboxes at Manchester Piccadilly station, Patel turned to Wellcome Images for inspiration. "I used this collection as a starting-point for the series of drawings, in which I map environmental data upon structures of the internal body.”

Following a period of research at the Human Geography department at Manchester Metropolitan university, she worked with Geographical Information Systems to map data about Manchester’s growth, air quality and noise levels onto biological structures.

The drawings were commissioned by the Hamilton Project and are being shown at Manchester Piccadilly's Metrolink platform, until 30 December 2011. The project was supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and is an associate event for this year's Shisha-initiated Asia Triennial Manchester (ATM11).

Diffusion 1.4: Lung tissue (left, by Spike Walker) and Manchester orbital motorways (above).

Diffusion 1.1: Alveolar spaces in the lungs (left, by David Gregory and Debbie Marshall) as a contour map of Manchester (above, in red) with a choropleth map (green) showing 3+ car ownership per household in Greater Manchester.

Diffusion 1.2: A mast cell with histamine granules (left, from the University of Edinburgh) as a dot map showing sites of air pollution emissions in Greater Manchester (above).

This feature appears in ‘Wellcome News’ issue 69.